Dr. June Mendeley (left) and Steve Henderson (right) (Image: Elizabeth MacLeod)
Heroes’ Beacon Comics & Games’ is returning to hosting in-person events while following social distancing protocols.
The store opened in 2013, created by co-owners Steve Henderson and Chris Duffield, and resumed operations on May 11 after being shut down in March due to the pandemic.
They are preparing to host their regular groups, including Magic: The Gathering, Dungeons and Dragons and Star Wars miniatures battlers.
“We’re planning on trying to bring everything back in August in some capacity as limited people and going to require facemasks and regular sanitation, everything to keep everybody safe of course,” said Henderson said. He added they have finalized the layout that they will set up to keep groups separate from the store’s retail section.
Heroes’ Beacon (Image: Elizabeth MacLeod)
Finding ways to stay active and support local has been a major goal during COVID-19. After the Offline Board Game café closed Henderson said he told Susan Pass he is willing to buy the remaining games after she finished selling them off online. “That’s not easy for any small business, everybody is trying to find a way to cope,” he said.
“It was really sad because I know they were doing a lot of stuff during the lockdown and they had they were delivering games and they were doing all these things that were useful, it seemed like a good synergy there,” added Dr. June Madeley, Associate Professor of Social Science at UNBSJ.
Heroes’ Beacon’s Between the Panels Book-Club, which began in late 2013 and is held bi-weekly on Thursdays, will also restart in-person meetings.
“I try and get students to go to a local comic book store, go look around, ask them questions, see what a comic store is like, because a lot of them have never done that,” said Dr. Madeley, who is the book-club’s main coordinator.
She learned about Heroes’ Beacon and the book-club from her students and started attending in 2015. “I came in for the new Ms. Marvel and it was so much fun,” she said.
The books read by the group are a mixture of superhero, fictional and biographical genres, from Chis Claremont’s X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga, Naoko Takeuchi’s Sailor Moon, and Art Spielman’s Maus to the young adult series Lumberjanes and John Backderf’s My Friend Dahmer.
“Sometimes you read an older book with a more modern perspective and you don’t see it quite the same way,” said Henderson, referring to the relationship between mercenary Deathstroke and troubled meta-teen Terra.
Examples of Between the Panel’s book selections (Image: Elizabeth MacLeod)
Dr. Madeley adds, “Certainly there’s a lot of very tone deaf, sometimes possibly racist kinds of things that that really strike you now that wouldn’t have, you know, and some of us remember them from being kids and we think, ‘oh boy I thought this and I didn’t see that when I was 10!’”
Currently the book-club has six to eight regular members, who come up with questions for discussion during the meetings. Heroes’ Beacon also offers a 10% discount if the book-club title is purchased in store.
“We used to have to order them like a few months [in advance] and now, especially now with COVID, we’ve been sort of like, ‘Okay, what should we read next, do we think we can order that in time?,’” said Dr. Madeley.
Despite the pandemic the club has not missed a meeting, pivoting easily online via Facebook Live and Microsoft Teams.
“People had read the book anyway because it was literally the next week after a lot of things had shut down,” Dr. Madeley said.
